Wednesday, February 10, 2016

As the Maetreum of Cybele continues to break new ground, the "mainstream" (can anything Pagan actually be mainstream?) Pagan blog-o-sphere continues to basically ignore us. This used to piss me off but upon reflection is one of those accidental "gifts" in many respects.

I don't do a lot of updates to this blog because frankly, I work my butt off doing real world work. Our community low power radio station for example takes up a lot of my time and effort. I am personally producing about 43 hours a week of original programming, doing much of the bookkeeping and maintaining the equipment. This past fall, despite only being on the air for a little over two months at that point, we hostessed a national community radio conference here at the Maetreum. We are the first and only Pagan owned and operated broadcast radio station in America, that alone would have been crowed to the hills if someone besides us in the Pagan community had pulled it off, let alone turning around and hostessing a national radio conference to boot.

A little over a year ago we won an eight year legal battle for legal recognition of a Pagan "church", us, to equal treatment under the law. This was considered a landmark case in legal circles, was even written up in the Washington Post and Forbes magazine but barely mentioned in the Pagan world.

Currently one of our priestesses is writing her doctorate thesis on the Cybeline Revival, the first time, to the best of our knowledge, a Pagan Goddess tradition will be elevated to a field of academic study. While other Pagan groups are recognized for gathering some canned goods to help those in need, we have been taking in, supporting and helping women bootstrap their lives back for well over a decade. We even took a refugee from Nepal all the way through the minefield of getting asylum status from Homeland Security and the Immigration system after being told by so called "professional" immigration aid organizations we would never pull it off.

Our legal battle saw us ignored by every single Pagan rights organization and all the self appointed legal Pagans when we asked for help.

So remember, if you attend all those various Pagan conferences like Pantheacon this year, that while they are all talking about what they are going to do some time in the future, we've been doing it.... for years.